SHANGHAI, May 10 -- A Shanghai house-moving company yesterday filed a suit in a local court against Baidu.com, the biggest domestic search engine in China, for alleged trade mark infringement and claimed compensation of 500,000 yuan (US$65,000).

Unlicensed removalists are flooding the search portal with advertisements copying the name of the removalist, Dazhong Transport Group has petitioned the court asking for the removal of the imitators' links from the Website. It also asked the operators, three subsidiaries of the Nasdaq listed company, to apologize.

The Shanghai No.2 Intermediate People's Court will hear the case.

Most of the offending imitators published their advertisements on Baidu.com with Dazhong's trade mark and logo or even alleged to be one of Dazhong's affiliates by using the search engine's chargeable page rank system, which helps them to be listed ahead among the search results.

Some well-known legitimate city house-moving companies are reported to be suffering major business losses because of the activities of illicit copycats, which accounted for most of the search results on some search engines and who are widely seen in the classified columns of newspapers and yellow pages.

Gongxing, another of the only 22 authorized removalists in the city, also urged Baidu.com to remove the bogus information in an affidavit.

Baidu.com has deleted a dozen links from its Website.